Notes and Editorial Reviews

Pianist Patricia Goodson has made a systematic study of Josef Bohuslav Foerster’s piano music, and presents it complete for the first time on this inexpensive and very well-recorded four-CD set. Throughout his long life (1859-1951) Foerster wrote a great deal of music. The latest numbered work here, the Two Pieces for the Left Hand, is his opus 142, but he’s best known for his opera Eva, the Fourth Symphony, the tone poem Cyrano de Bergerac, and most of all for being a FOM (Friend of Mahler).

Although Czech, Foerster’s music belongs squarely within the German school; he’s more like Fibich than Dvorák, and his piano works advance from the style of Schumann and Brahms to that of Richard Strauss. There is only one bigRead more work here, the theme and variations entitled The Masks of Eros. The music is quite inventive, but there’s nothing erotic about it if by that we mean “sexy.” Foerster was one of those sincere, religious guys whose artistic and aesthetic makeup was morally upright and decidedly non-sensual, although this of course doesn’t mean that his music is inexpressive any more than it does with Dvorák.

All the rest of these works are short, lyrical pieces often grouped into suites either with evocative titles, “Evening Music,” “Charcoal Sketches,” “Dreaming,” “Roses of Remembrance,” or else named after places, as in the “Osenice” and “Jicín” Suites. The Allegro impetuoso third movement of the former work gives you a good idea of what to expect. After living with this set for a while, the overall impression of the music is very pleasant, but not terribly memorable. Foerster was not a tunesmith, and his chromatic, Straussian later style tends to slide in one ear and out the other. That said, his feeling for harmony was quite personal and he doesn’t sound precisely like anyone else.

Patricia Goodson clearly cares about this music. She took her time recording it–three years–and her thoughtfulness and consideration definitely show in her natural feeling for pace and phrasing, and in her attention to nuance. I am sure that she would be the last person to suggest that you listen to big gobs of this stuff all at once, but taken in measured doses the music does make a distinctive, if somewhat elusive, impression. This set will be welcomed by collectors of late romantic music, and it certainly illuminates the work of this still somewhat mysterious character.